It's that time of year where I desperately shove things out the door to make way for the inevitable appearance of new Oktrollberfest submissions! It's also that time of year when I have 30 things I should be doing right now, like the dishes, and voting, and finishing my own Oktrollberfest entry. So forgive the abruptness as I present a dozen games with more to come in a week or two!
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“La Vie Moderne de V-QUEL” by Snorb (2024)
One of this year's Oktrollberfest entries that I can't really talk about since I've yet to stream any of them! A parody of Best of ZZT Part 2 at the very least!
“Zolotl” by Snorb (2022)
A standalone release of a Summer 2022 2.4 Hours of ZZT jam entry. Find a zolotl plant to "class up the joint" a bit. Get keys. Talk to trees.
“Donkey Kong Brunchery” by BigtimeDudeProductions (2024)
BigtimeDude returns with a number of more bizarre games that cross the wires between Yoshi-esque ZZT fan game and more surreal works from the likes of perhaps Viovis. K. Rool has been revived and the banana hoard has been stolen, so it's up to Dixie Kong to deal with the situation. Also she's French? I mean, she does have a beret. The game also says she once dated Rayman, so perhaps I'm more behind on the canon than I thought.
“Donkey Kong Brunchery 2: Dixie's Pong Quest” by BigtimeDudeProductions (2024)
A trippy sequel with a search for a Pong game machine. Obviously. Some incredible dithering on the title screen.
“Crash TV Starring Crash Bandicoot and Coco” by BigtimeDudeProductions (2024)
A mash of Crash (Bandicoot) and Smash (TV). Dr. Cortex's new and brutal livestream phenomenon is a wacky blood-sport for marsupials. Crash and Coco need to win enough prize money to be able to bring the show offline.
“Save the World” by Brendan Sullivan (1997)
A rough little adventure that sees you driving your super fast car to a missile base to stop a nuclear launch. Pick the right passage, and you'll disarm the nuke. Pick wrong, and it's all over for everyone. Relies on giving villains the worst Russian accents possible to establish them as the bad guys. Lots of "Missile-ski" and such which makes an already flawed game even more eye-roll inducing.
“ZZT World Issues 1-4” by Greentryst
A collection of incredibly sad magazines. Four issues were produced before they were actually released, so every issues has the usual call for submissions followed by the disappointment that nobody sent anything in to this magazine nobody would have known existed.
Hilariously, one of the issues reviews Save the World.
“Rescue” by awebs (2002)
A 100 board action game that manages to not go on too long! Tasked with rescuing a child from a cave filled with evil robots, you have to blast your way through countless obstacles to return the child to his father. You can really see the author improve their skills as the game goes along, especially once they discover the ZZT Encyclopedia. There's a lot in here, and while not everything plays as well as the author would have hoped, there are a number of creative boards that do more than just give players some lions and robots to shoot. One of the better Wildcard stream finds imo.
“Rescue (December 2000)” by awebs (2000)
An alternate version that stops right when things were getting out of hand with a level that was cut from the final game. The game went on an extended hiatus before eventually being returned to and completed in the version above.
“The Forbidden Island” by Mark McIntyre (1994)
Another 100 board game that's quite solid? A Zelda-inspired "escape this island you shipwrecked on" game that sees you starting in a central village where you find items for villagers to get keys to access new areas. It begins with some extremely heavy lifting of segments from Link's Awakening but really comes into its own. Another real good Wildcard find with some nice looking STK-free boards and an annoying amount of backtracking.
“Escape!” by Mark McIntyre (1994)
A simple prison escape game. No real story as to who you are, who is imprisoning you, or why they did so, but it is full of guards to shoot. Notably their movement patterns make them very difficult to hit, resulting in a much more challenging action title than you'd expect given how the game looks. Impressive, until the final boss overdoes it with stars and a massive health pool.
“Test Game” by Mark McIntyre (1995)
Not a mess of experiments in game design. Test Game is a challenge extended by Mark to the player to see how far they can get without dying or becoming stuck, with a little rating system for how many boards have been completed. It does a pretty decent job of it, and I definitely fell for a number of its tricks in my stream, having to zap onward to later levels after screwing up. Later on it leans in hard on Super ZZT's The Lost Forest, featuring a number of giant bosses that require shooting weak points to get keys and then launching missiles at to explode them. The kind of game I'd genuinely have tried again and again to "prove" myself in as a child.
